Affordable Housing

Endorsements 2012: San Francisco propositions

Andrew Lam
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Endorsements 2012: San Francisco propositions

PROPOSITION A

CITY COLLEGE PARCEL TAX

YES

The scathing accreditation report by the Western Association of Schools talks about governance problems at the San Francisco Community College District — a legitimate matter of concern. But most of what threatens the future of City College is a lack of money.

Check out the accreditation letter; it’s on the City College website. Much of what it says is that the school is trying to do too much with limited resources. There aren’t enough administrators; that’s because, facing 20 percent cuts to its operating budget, the college board decided to save front-line teaching jobs. Student support services are lacking; that’s because the district can barely afford to keep enough classes going to meet the needs of some 90,000 students. On the bigger picture, WASC and the state want City College to close campuses and concentrate on a core mission of offering two-year degrees and preparing students to transfer to four-year institutions. That’s because the state has refused to fund education at an adequate level, and there’s not enough money to both function as a traditional junior college and serve as the training center for San Francisco’s tech, hospitality and health-care industry, provide English as a second language classes to immigrants and offer new job skills and rehabilitation to the workforce of the future.

It’s fair to say that WASC would have found some problems at City College no matter what the financial situation (and we’ve found more — the nepotism and corruption under past boards has been atrocious). But the only way out of this mess is either to radically scale back the school’s mission — or to increase its resources. We support the latter alternative.

Prop. A is a modest parcel tax — $79 dollars a year on each property lot in the city. Parcel taxes are inherently unfair — a small house in Hunters Point pays as much as a mansion in Pacific Heights or a $500 million downtown office building. But that’s the result of Prop. 13, which leaves the city very few ways to raise taxes on real property. In the hierarchy of progressive tax options, parcel taxes are better than sales taxes. And the vast majority of San Francisco homeowners and commercial property owners get a huge benefit from Prop. 13; a $6 a month additional levy is hardly a killer.

The $16 million this tax would raise annually for the district isn’t enough to make up for the $25 million a year in state budget cuts. But at least the district would be able to make reasonable decisions about preserving most of its mission. This is one of the most important measures on the ballot; vote yes.

PROPOSITION B

PARKS BOND

YES

There are two questions facing the voters: Does the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department need money to fix up badly decrepit, sometimes unsafe facilities, and build out new park areas, particularly in underserved neighborhoods? Has the current administration of the department so badly mismanaged Rec-Park, so radically undermined the basic concept of public access to public space, so utterly alienated neighborhoods and communities all over the city, that it shouldn’t be trusted with another penny?

And if your answer to both is yes, how the hell do you vote on Prop. B?

It’s a tough one for us. The Guardian has never, in 46 years, opposed a general obligation bond for anything except jail or prisons. Investing in public infrastructure is a good thing; if anything, the cautious folks at City Hall, who refuse to put new bonds on the ballot until old ones are paid off, are too cautious about it. Spending public money (paid by increased property taxes in a city where at least 90 percent of real estate is way under taxed thanks to Prop. 13) creates jobs. It’s an economic stimulus. It adds to the value of the city’s resources. In this case, it fixes up parks. All of that is good; it’s hard to find a credible case against it.

Except that for the past few years, under the administrations of Mayors Gavin Newsom and Ed Lee and the trusteeship of Rec-Park Directors Jared Blumenfeld and Phil Ginsburg, the city has gone 100 percent the wrong way. Parks are supposed to be public resources, open to all; instead, the department has begun charging fees for what used to be free, has been turning public facilities over to private interests (at times kicking the public out), and has generally looked at the commons as a source of revenue. It’s a horrible precedent. It makes us sick.

Ginsburg told us that he’s had no choice — deep budget cuts have forced him to look for money wherever he can find it, even if that means privatizing the parks. But Ginsburg also admitted to us that, even as chief of staff under Newsom, he never once came forward to push for higher taxes on the wealthy, never once suggested that progressive revenue sources might be an option. Nor did any of the hacks on the Rec-Park Commission. Instead, they’ve been busy spending tens of thousands of dollars on an insane legal battle to evict the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council’s recycling center — entirely because rich people in the Haight don’t want poor people coming through their elite neighborhood to cash in bottles and cans for a little money.

So now we’re supposed to cough up another $195 million to enable more of this?

Well, yes. We’re not happy to be endorsing Prop. B, but the bottom line is simple: The bond money will go for things that need to be done. There are, quite literally, parks in the city where kids are playing in unsafe and toxic conditions. There are rec centers that are pretty close to falling apart. Those improvements will last 50 years, well beyond the tenure of this mayor of Rec-Park director. For the long-term future of the park system, Prop. B makes sense.

If the measure fails, it may send Lee and Ginsburg a message. The fact that so many neighborhood leaders are opposing it has already been a signal — one that so far Ginsburg has ignored. We’re going Yes on B, with all due reservations. But this commission has to go, and the sooner the supervisors can craft a charter amendment to give the board a majority of the appointments to the panel the better.+

PROPOSITION C

AFFORDABLE HOUSING TRUST FUND

YES

This measure is about who gets to live in San Francisco and what kind of city this will be in 20 years. If we leave it up to market forces and the desires of developers, about 85 percent of the housing built in San Francisco will be affordable only by the rich, meaning the working class will be forced to live outside the city, clogging regional roadways and transit systems and draining San Francisco of its cultural diversity and vibrancy. And that process has been accelerated in recent years by the latest tech bubble, which city leaders have decided to subsidize with tax breaks, causing rents and home prices to skyrocket.

Mayor Ed Lee deserves credit for proposing this Housing Trust Fund to help offset some of that impact, even if it falls way short of the need identified in the city’s Housing Element, which calls for 60 percent of new housing construction to be affordable to prevent gentrification. We’re also not thrilled that Prop. C actually reduces the percentage of housing that developers must offer below market rates and prevents that 12 percent level from later being increased, that it devotes too much money to home ownership assistance at the expense of the renters who comprise the vast majority of city residents, and that it depends on the passage of Prop.E and would take $15 million from the increased business taxes from that measure, rather than restoring years of cuts to General Fund programs.

But Prop. C was a hard-won compromise, with the affordable housing folks at the table, and they got most of what they wanted. (Even the 12 percent has a long list of exceptions and thus won’t apply to a lot of new market-rate housing.) And it has more chance of actually passing than previous efforts that were opposed by the business community and Mayor’s Office. This measure would commit the city to spending $1.5 billion on affordable housing projects over the next 30 years, with an initial $20 million annual contribution steadily growing to more than $50 million annually by 2024, authorizing and funding the construction of 30,000 new rental units throughout the city. With the loss of redevelopment funds that were devoted to affordable housing, San Francisco is a city at risk, and passage of Prop. C is vital to ensuring that we all have a chance of remaining here. Vote yes.

PROPOSITION D

CONSOLIDATING ODD-YEAR LOCAL ELECTIONS

YES

There’s a lot of odd stuff in the San Francisco City Charter, and one of the twists is that two offices — the city attorney and the treasurer — are elected in an off-year when there’s nothing else on the ballot. There’s a quaint kind of charm to that, and some limited value — the city attorney is one of the most powerful officials in local government, and that race could get lost in an election where the mayor, sheriff, and district attorney are all on the ballot.

But seriously: The off-year elections have lower turnout, and cost the city money, and it’s pretty ridiculous that San Francisco still does it this way. The entire Board of Supervisors supports Prop. D. So do we. Vote yes.

PROPOSITION E

GROSS RECEIPTS TAX

YES

Over the past five years, Board of Supervisors President David Chiu estimates, San Francisco has cut about $1.5 billion from General Fund programs. It’s been bloody, nasty, awful. The budget reductions have thrown severely ill psych patients out of General Hospital and onto the streets. They’ve forced the Recreation and Parks Department to charge money for the use of public space. They’ve undermined everything from community policing to Muni maintenance.

And now, as the economy starts to stabilize a bit, the mayor wants to change the way businesses are taxed — and bring an additional $28.5 million into city coffers.

That’s right — we’ve cut $1.5 billion, and we’re raising taxes by $28.5 million. That’s less than 2 percent. It’s insane, it’s inexcusable, it’s utterly the wrong way to run a city in 2012. It might as well be Mitt Romney making the decision — 98 percent cuts, 2 percent tax hikes.

Nevertheless, that’s where we are today — and it’s sad to say this is an improvement from where the tax discussion started. At first, Mayor Lee didn’t want any tax increase at all; progressive leaders had to struggle to convince him to allow even a pittance in additional revenue.

The basic issue on the table is how San Francisco taxes businesses. Until the late 1990s, the city had a relatively rational system — businesses paid about 1.5 percent of their payroll or gross receipts, whichever was higher. Then 52 big corporations, including PG&E, Chevron, Bechtel, and the Gap, sued, arguing that the gross receipts part of the program was unfair. The supervisors caved in to the legal threat and repeal that part of the tax system — costing the city about $30 million a year. Oh, but then tech companies — which have high payrolls but often, at least at first, low gross receipts — didn’t want the payroll tax. The same players who opposed the other tax now called for its return, arguing that taxing payroll hurts job growth (which is untrue and unfounded, but this kind of dogma doesn’t get challenged in the press). So, after much discussion and debate, and legitimate community input, the supervisors unanimously approved Prop. E — which raises a little more money, but not even as much as the corporate lawsuit in the 1990s set the city back. It’s not a bad tax, better than the one we have now — it brings thousands of companies the previously paid no tax at all into the mix (sadly, some of them small businesses). It’s somewhat progressive — companies with higher receipts pay a higher rate. We can’t argue against it — the city will be better off under Prop. E than it is today. But we have to look around our battered, broke-ass city, shake our poor bewildered heads and say: Is this really the best San Francisco can do? Sure, vote yes on E. And ask yourself why one of the most liberal cities in America still lets Republican economic theory drive its tax policy.

PROPOSITION F

WATER AND ENVIRONMENT PLAN

NO, NO, NO

Reasonable people can disagree about whether San Francisco should have ever dammed the Tuolumne River in 1923, flooding the Hetch Hetchy Valley and creating an engineering marvel that has provided the city with a reliable source of renewable electricity and some of the best urban drinking water in the world ever since. The project broke the heart of famed naturalist John Muir and has caused generations since then to pine for the restoration of a valley that Muir saw as a twin to his beloved nearby Yosemite Valley.

But at a time when this country can’t find the resources to seriously address global warming (which will likely dry up the Sierra Nevada watershed at some point in the future), our deteriorating infrastructure, and myriad other pressing problems, it seems insane to even consider spending billions of dollars to drain this reservoir, restore the valley, and find replacement sources of clean water and power.

You can’t argue with the basic facts: There is no way San Francisco could replace all the water that comes in from Hetch Hetchy without relying on the already-fragile Delta. The dam also provides 1.7 billion kilowatt hours a year of electric power, enough to meet the needs of more than 400,000 homes. That power now runs everything from the lights at City Hall to Muni, at a cost of near zero. The city would lose 42 percent of its energy generation if the dam went away.

Besides, the dam was, and is, the lynchpin of what’s supposed to be a municipal power system in the city. As San Francisco, with Clean Power SF, moves ever close to public power, it’s insane to take away this critical element of any future system.

On its face, the measure merely requires the city to do an $8 million study of the proposal and then hold a binding vote in 2016 that would commit the city to a project estimated by the Controller’s Office to cost somewhere between $3 billion and $10 billion. Yet to even entertain that possibility would be a huge waste of time and money.

Prop. F is being pushed by a combination of wishful (although largely well-meaning) sentimentalists and disingenuous conservatives like Dan Lungren who simply want to fuck with San Francisco, but it’s being opposed by just about every public official in the city. Vote this down and let’s focus our attention on dealing with real environmental and social problems.

PROPOSITION G

CORPORATE PERSONHOOD

YES

If San Francisco voters pass Prop. G, it won’t put any law into effect. It’s simply a policy statement that sends a message: Corporations are not people, and it’s time for the federal government to tackle the overwhelming and deeply troubling control that wealthy corporations have over American politics.

Prop. G declares that money is not speech and that limits on political spending improve democratic processes. It urges a reversal of the notorious Citizens United vs. Federal Elections Commission Supreme Court decision.

A constitutional amendment, and any legal messing with free speech, has serious potential problems. If corporations are limited from spending money on politics, could the same apply to unions or nonprofits? Could such an amendment be used to stop a community organization from spending money to print flyers with political opinions?

But it’s a discussion that the nation needs to have, and Prop. G is a modest start. Vote yes.

Endorsement interviews: Julian Davis for D. 5 supervisor

Zelda Bronstein
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Endorsement interviews: Julian Davis for D. 5 supervisor

Julian Davis, a candidate in District Five, has lined up some impressive endorsements. He’s running to the left of the incumbent, Christina Olague, and talked about “why ordinary people can’t live in this city any more.” He told us that in the 1990s, the city of Chicago poured billions of dollars into affordable housing, and “San Francisco needs to think in the billions.” He also called for a “comprehensive and aggressive revenue strategyl.” You can listen to the entire interview after the jump.

Endorsement interviews: Norman Yee for D. 7 supervisor

Zelda Bronstein
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Endorsement interviews: Norman Yee for D. 7 supervisor

Norman Yee, president of the School Board, is running in the tighly contested race for District 7, one of the most conservative districts in the city. Yee talked about the sorts of things you’d expect a district candidate to talk about — public safety (and pedestrian safety, an issue particularly important to Yee, who was seriously injured by a car), public schools, keeping libraries open, and parks.

But he also talked about citywide concerns — he’s a supporter of Local Hire, supports the City College parcel tax, and wants to see an audit of city-owned land to look for places to build affordable housing. He supports a program to legalize existing in-law units if they’re brought up to code.

You can listen to the entire interview here:

 

 

Endorsement interviews: John Rizzo (D5 supervisor)

Zelda Bronstein
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Endorsement interviews: John Rizzo (D5 supervisor)

We’re underway with our endorsement interviews for the November election, and I’ll be posting the full sound file of all the interviews as we finish them (and as I have time to upload them). First up: Community College Board member John Rizzo, who is running for supervisor in District 5.

Rizzo told us he has the political experience to take on the district’s, and the city’s, tough problems. Among other things, he wants to eliminate the fund that developer pay into for affordable housing and require market-rate builders to construct affordable units on site. He discussed a “scientific approach” to managing Muni and wants a closer audit of the $600 million the city gives to nonprofits providing public services every year.

You can listen after the jump.

Farmville, for real

Andrew Lam
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Farmville, for real

yael@sfbg.com

In the next few months, San Francisco will lose some of its most beloved urban farms.

The City Hall victory garden is now reduced to dirt. The grants that kept afloat Quesada Gardens Initiative, which creates community gardens in Bayview, were temporary and are now drying up. Kezar Gardens, funded by the Haight Asbury Neighborhood Council recycling center, is facing eviction by the city.

Time is up for Hayes Valley Farm, on the old freeway ramp, where developers are now ready to build condos.

St. Paulus Lutheran Church has also announced that it wants to sell the land that the Free Farm uses at Eddy and Gough.

“There’s the old joke about developers,” said Antonio Roman-Alcalá, co-founder of Alemany Farm and the San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance. “God must be a developer, because they always seem to get their way.”

At the same time, new urban agriculture projects have sprung up across San Francisco. Legislation authored by Sup. David Chiu will create a city Urban Agriculture Program, with the goal of coordinating efforts throughout the city.

So is the movement to grow food in the city progressing? It’s a tricky question that gets down to one of the oldest conflicts in San Francisco: The best use of scarce, expensive land.

THE VALUE OF FARMING

The San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association lauds the value of community gardens. An April 2012 SPUR report notes that urban agriculture connects people “to the broader food system, offers open space and recreation, provides hands-on education, presents new and untested business opportunities, and builds community.”

According to the report, the city had “nearly 100 gardens and farms on both public and private land (not including school gardens),” two dozen of which started in the past four years.

But that’s nowhere near enough for the demand. “The last time waiting lists were surveyed, there were over 550 people waiting,” Eli Zigas, Food Systems and Urban Agriculture Program Manager at SPUR, told us. “That likely underrepresents demand because some people who are interested haven’t put their name down.”

Changes in zoning last year, and the recent ordinance to create the Urban Agriculture Program, show a measure of city support for urban farming and gardening.

“We have one of the most permissive zoning codes for urban agriculture that I know of in the country,” said Zigas.

One zoning change from 2011 makes it explicit that community gardens and farms less than one acre in size are welcome anywhere in the city, and that projects on larger plots of land are allowed in certain non-residential districts.

More recent legislation is meant to streamline the process of starting to grow food in the city. Applying to use empty public land for a garden can be an arduous process, and every public agency has a different approach. The hoops to jump through for land owned by the Police Department, for example, are entirely different than what the Public Utilities Commission requires. A new Urban Agriculture Program would coordinate efforts.

“The idea is to create a new program that will serve as the main point of entry. Whether it will be managed by existing agency or nonprofit is to be determined,” said Zigas.

If the timeline laid out in the ordinance is followed, the plan will be implemented by Jan.1, 2014.

By then, if all goes according to plan, no San Franciscan looking to garden will wait more than a year for access to a community garden plot.

NO NEW LAND

Roman-Alcalá said that efforts to clear the way for urban agriculture are much less controversial than for affordable housing and other tenets of anti-gentrification. But for all the good the latest legislation does, it doesn’t secure a single square foot of land for urban agriculture.

“If you look at the language, there’s nowhere in it that mandates or prioritizes urban agriculture on any site,” said Roman-Alcalá. “The closest thing is a call for an audit of city owned rooftops. That’s the closest it comes to changing land use.”

And it won’t be easy. “No matter how much support there is for urban agriculture, in the end, developers and their ability to make money is going to be prioritized,'” he said. “The only way to really challenge that right now is cultural. Social change is not an event but a process.”

Janelle Fitzpatrick, a member of the Hayes Valley Farm Resource Council and a neighborhood resident who has been volunteering at the farm since it started, is committed to that process.

“Hayes Valley Farm proves that when the city, developers, and communities come together, urban agriculture projects can be successful,” Fitzpatrick said. She and dozens of other volunteers created the farm, which is now lush with food crops, flowers, and trees. The farm has a bee colony, a seed library, and a green house. It offers yoga and urban permaculture classes.

Hayes Valley Farm started on land that used to be ramps to the Central Freeway before that section was damaged in the Loma Prieta earthquake. The land under the freeway was toxic, but volunteers spent six months layering mulch and cardboard and planting fava beans to create soil. It took less than a year to create a productive farm on a lot that had been vacant and overgrown for nearly two decades.

“We’re producing food, we’re producing community, we’re producing education,” said Zoey Kroll, another volunteer and resource council member.

When they vacate their land in the winter, many Hayes Valley Farm team members will already be knee deep in new urban agriculture projects. These include Bloom Justice, a flower farm in the Lower Haight that Kroll says will teach job skills like forestry and landscaping. The farm has also built a relationship with Hunters Point Family, working together to offer organic gardening and produce at Double Rock Community Garden at the Alice Griffith Housing Development and Adam Rogers Community Garden.

As for the loss of the current site, Kroll says, “It’s an exercise in detachment.” Change in landscapes and ownership is part of urban life, she said — “We’re a city of renters.”

We’re also a city of very limited land. “Securing permanent public land for urban agriculture would be challenging,” said Kevin Bayuk, an instructor at the Urban Permaculture Institute. “And securing long-term tenure on anything significant, an acre or more of land in San Francisco, if it were on private land, would be cost prohibitive.”

Of the city’s three largest farms, only Alemany Farm seems secure in its future. The farm is on Recreation and Parks Department land, and has been working with the department since 2005 to create a somewhat autonomous governance structure.

Community gardens on Rec-Park land are subject to a 60-page rulebook, and according to Roman-Alcalá, Alemany Farm’s operations were restricted by the rules.

Last week, the group’s plan to be reclassified as a farm instead of a garden was approved, eliminating some of the rules and creating an advisory council of community stakeholders that will exert decision making power over the farm, although Rec-Park still has ultimate authority.

“Now it’s more secure,” said Roman-Alcalá. “We’ve finally reached this point where the city acknowledges it as a food production site.”

“I think the urban agriculture movement is still growing and burgeoning in the grassroots sense,” said Bayuk. “And I think some of the grassroots growth is reflected in the policy and code changes. “I’m optimistic for the idea of people putting land into productive use to meet human needs and be a benefit of all life.”

This article has been corrected to reflect information about the location and ownership of the Free Farm.

Compromise measures

Andrew Lam
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Compromise measures

news@sfbg.com

San Franciscans are poised to vote this November on two important, complicated, and interdependent ballot measures — one a sweeping overhaul of the city’s business tax, the other creating an Affordable Housing Trust Fund that relies on the first measure’s steep increase in business license fees — that were the products of intense backroom negotiations over the last six months.

Mayor Ed Lee and his business community allies sought a revenue-neutral business tax reform measure that might have had to compete against an alternative proposal developed by Sup. John Avalos and his labor and progressive allies, who sought around $40 million in new revenue, although both sides wanted to avoid that fight and find a compromise measure.

Meanwhile, Mayor Lee was having trouble securing business community support for the housing trust fund that he pledged to create during his inaugural address in City Hall in January. So he modified his business tax proposal to bring in $13 million that would be dedicated to the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, but that didn’t satisfy the Avalos camp, who insisted the city needed more general revenue to offset cuts to city services and help with the city’s structural budget deficit.

Less than a day before the competing business reform measures came before the Board of Supervisors on July 24, a compromise was finally struck that would bring $28.5 million a year, with $13 million of that set aside for the affordable housing fund, tying the fate of the two measures together and creating a kumbaya moment at City Hall that was reminiscent of last year’s successful pension reform deal between labor and the business community.

But there was one voice raised at that July 24 meeting, that of Sup. David Campos, who asked questions and expressed concerns over whether this deal will adequately address the “crisis” faced by the working class in a city that will continue to gentrify even if both of these measures pass. Affordable housing construction still won’t meet the long-term needs outlined in the city’s Housing Element that indicates 60 percent of housing construction would need public subsidies to be affordable to current city residents.

It’s also worth asking why a business tax reform measure that doubles the tax base — just 8.4 percent of businesses in San Francisco now pay the payroll tax, whereas 16.4 percent would pay the gross receipts tax that replaces it — doesn’t increase its current funding level of $410 million (the $28.5 million comes from increased business license fees). Some industries — most notably the technology and restaurant industries that have strongly supported Mayor Lee’s political ambitions — could receive substantial tax cuts.

Politics is about compromise, and Avalos tells us that in the current political climate, these measures are the best that we can hope for and worthy of progressive support. And that may be true, but it also indicates that San Francisco will continue to be more welcoming to businesses than the working class residents struggling to remain here.

 

SOARING HOUSING COSTS

As Mayor Lee acknowledged during his inaugural speech, the boom times in the technology industry has also been driving up commercial and residential rents, he sought to create “housing for the 100 percent.”

The median rent in San Francisco has been steadily rising, jumping again in June an astounding 12.9 percent over June of last year, according to real estate monitor RealFacts, leaving renters shelling out on average an extra $350 a month to landlords.

Driven by a booming tech industry and a lag in new housing, the average San Francisco apartment now rents for $2,734. That’s an annual increase of $4,000 per unit over last year, in a city that saw the highest jumps in rent nationally in the first quarter of 2012. Even prices for the average studio apartment have edged up to $1,800 a month.

The affordability gap between housing and wages in the city is stark. Somebody spending a quarter of their income on rent would need to be making $85,000 a year just to keep up with the average studio. With a mean wage of $64,820 in the San Francisco metro area, even middle class San Franciscans have a difficult time affording a modest apartment. For the city’s lowest paid workers, even earning the country’s highest minimum wage of $10.25 an hour, even devoting every earned dollar to rent still wouldn’t pay for the average small studio apartment.

For those looking to buy a home in the city, it can be a huge hurdle to put aside a down payment while keeping up with the city’s high rents. Almost 90 percent of San Franciscans cannot afford a market rate home in the city. The average San Francisco home price was up 1.9 percent in June over May, climbing to $713,500, or a leap of $50,000 per unit over last year’s prices.

In the 2010 census, before the recent boom in the local real estate market, San Francisco already ranked third in the nation for worst ratio between income and home ownership prices, behind Honolulu and Santa Cruz.

But as the city leadership grapples to mitigate the tech boom’s effects, the lingering recession and conservative opposition to new taxes have gutted state and federal funds for affordable housing. Capped off last December by the California Legislature’s decision to dissolve the State Redevelopment Agency, a major source of money for creating affordable housing, San Francisco has seen a drop of $56 million in annual affordable housing funds since 2007.

Trying to address dwindling funding for affordable housing, the Board of Supervisors voted 8-2 on July 24 to place the Affordable Housing Trust Fund measure on the fall ballot. Only the most conservative supervisors, Sups. Sean Elsbernd and Carmen Chu, opposed the proposal. Sup. Mark Farrell, who has signaled his support for the measure, was absent.

“Creating a permanent source of revenue to fund the production of housing in San Francisco will ensure that San Francisco is a viable place to live and work for everyone, at every level of the economic spectrum. I applaud the Board of Supervisors,” Mayor Lee said in response.

At the heart of the program, the city hopes to create 9,000 new units of affordable housing over 30 years. The measure would set aside money to help stabilize the ongoing foreclosure crisis and replenish the funds of a down payment assistance program for those earning 80 to 120 percent of the median income.

To do so, the city anticipates spending $1.2 billion over the 30-year lifespan of the program, with a $20 million annual contribution the first year increasing $2.5 million annually in subsequent years. It would fold some existing funding in with new revenue sources, including $13 million yearly from the business tax reform measure. Language in the housing fund measure would allow Mayor Lee to veto it is the business tax reform measure fails.

The board was forced to delay consideration of the business tax measure until July 31 because of changes in the freshly merged measures. That meeting was after Guardian press time, although with nine co-sponsors on the board, its passage seemed assured even before the Budget and Legislative Analysts Office had not yet assessed its impacts, as Campos requested on July 24.

“I do believe that we have to ask certain questions when a proposal of this magnitude comes forward,” Campos said at the hearing, later adding, “When you have a proposal of this magnitude, you’re not going to be able to adjust it for some time, so you want it to be right.”

The report that Campos requested, which came out in the late afternoon before the next day’s hearing, agreed that it would stabilize business tax revenue, but it raised concerns that some small businesses exempt from the payroll tax would pay more under the proposal and that it would create big winners and losers compared to the current system.

For example, it calculated that between the gross receipts tax and business license fee, a sample full service restaurant would pay 69 percent less taxes and a supermarket 33 percent less taxes, while a commercial real estate leasing firm would pay 46.7 percent more tax and a large engineering firm would see its business tax bills more than double.

Board President David Chiu, who has co-sponsored the business tax reform measure with Mayor Lee since its inception, agreed that it is a “once in a decade reform,” calling it a “compromise that reflects the best sense of that word.” And that view, that this is the best compromise city residents can expect, seems to be shared by leaders of various stripes.

 

BACKING THE COMPROMISE

The business community and fiscally conservative politicians have long called for the replacement of the city payroll tax — which they deride as a “job killer” because it uses labor costs to gauge the size of company’s size and ability to pay taxes — with a gross receipts tax that uses a different gauge. But the devil has been in the details.

Chiu praised the “dozens and dozens and dozens of companies that have worked with us to fine-tune this measure,” and press reports indicate that representatives of major corporations and economic sectors have all spent hours in the closed door meetings shaping the complicated formulas for how they will be taxed, which vary by industry.

When the Guardian made a Sunshine Ordinance request to the Mayor’s Office for a list of all the business representatives that have been involved in the meetings, its spokespersons said no such list exists. They have also asked for a time extension in our request to review all documents associated with the deliberations, delaying the review until next week at the earliest, after the board approves the measure.

But the business community seems to be on board, even though some economic sectors — including real estate firms and big construction companies — are expected to face tax hikes.

“The general reaction has been neutral to favorable, and I expect we’ll be supportive,” Jim Lazarus, the vice president of public policy for the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, who participated in crafting the proposal but who said the Chamber won’t have an official position until it votes later this week.

Lazarus noted the precipitous rise in annual business license fees — the top rate for the largest companies would go from just $500 now to $35,000 under the proposal, going up even more in the future as the Consumer Price Index rises — “but some of it will be offset by a drop in the payroll tax,” Lazarus said.

He also admitted that the new tax system will be “hugely complicated” compared to the payroll tax, with complex formulas that differ by sector and where economic transactions take place. But he said the Chamber has long supported the switch and he was happy to see a compromise.

“I’m assuming it will pass. I don’t believe there will be any major organized opposition to the measure,” Lazarus said.

Labor and progressive leaders also say the measure — which exempts small businesses with less than $1 million in revenue and has a steeply progressive business license fee scale — is a good proposal worth supporting, even if they didn’t get everything they wanted.

“We fared pretty well, the royal ‘we,’ with the mayor starting off from the position that he wanted a revenue-neutral proposition,” Chris Daly, who unsuccessfully championed affordable housing ballot measures as a supervisor before leaving office and becoming the political director for SEIU Local 1021, the largest union of city employees.

Both sides say they gave considerable ground to reach the compromise.

“Did we envision $28.5 million in new revenue? No,” said Lazarus, who had insisted from the beginning that the tax measure be revenue-neutral. “But we also didn’t envision the Affordable Housing Trust Fund.”

Daly and Avalos also said the measures need to be considered in the context of current political and economic realities.

“We were never going to be able to pass — or even to craft — a measure to meet all of the unmet needs in San Francisco,” Daly said. “Given the current political climate, we did very well.”

“If we had a different mayor who was more interested in serving directly the working class of the city, rather than supporting a business class that he hopes will serve all the people, the result might have been different,” Avalos said. “But what’s significant is we have a tax measure that really is progressive.”

Given that “we have an economic system that is based on profits and not human needs,” Avalos said, “This is a good step, better that we’ve had in decades.”

 

THE HOUSING CRISIS

The tax and housing measures certainly do address progressive priorities — bringing in more revenue and helping create affordable housing — even if some progressives express concerns that conditions in San Francisco could get worse for their vulnerable, working class constituents.

“I don’t know if the proposal before us is aggressive enough in terms of dealing with a crisis,” Campos told his colleagues on July 24 as they discussed the housing measure, later adding, “As good as this is, we are truly facing a crisis and a crisis requires a level of response that I unfortunately don’t think we are providing at this point.”

Not wanting to let “the perfect be the enemy of the good,” Campos said he still wanted to be able to support both measures, urging the board to have a more detailed discussion of their impacts.

“I wish this went further and created even more funding for critically needed affordable housing,” Sup. Eric Mar said before joining Campos in voting for the proposal anyway. “I think they need to build 60 percent of those units as below market rate otherwise we face more working families leaving the city, and the city becoming less diverse.”

Yet affordable housing advocates are desperate for something to replace the $56 million annual loss in affordable housing the city has faced in recent years, creating an immediate need for action and potentially allowing Lee to drive a wedge between the affordable housing advocates and labor if the latter held out for a better deal.

Many have heralded the mayor’s process in bringing together developers, housing advocates, and civic leaders to build a broad political consensus for the measure, particularly given the three affordable housing measures crafted by progressives over the last 10 years were all defeated by voters.

“One of the goals of any measure like this is for it to gain broad enough support to actually pass,” Sup. Scott Wiener said at a Rules Committee hearing on the measure.

In the measure’s grand bargain, developers receive a reduction in the percentage of on-site affordable housing units they are required to build, from 15 percent of units to 12 percent. The city will also buy some new housing units in large projects, paying market rate and then holding them as affordable housing — the buying power of which could be a boon to developers while creating affordable housing units.

At its root, the measure shifts some of the burden of funding affordable housing from developers to a broader tax base and locks in that agreement for 30 years, which could also spur market rate housing development in the process.

A late addition to the proposal by Farrell would create funding to help emergency workers with household earnings up to 150 percent of average median income buy homes in the city, citing a need to have these workers close at hand in the event of an earthquake or other emergency.

While some progressives have grumbled about the givebacks to developers and the high percentage of money going to homebuyer assistance in a city where almost two-thirds of residents rent, affordable housing advocates are pleased with the proposal.

“Did we gain out of this local package? Yes, we got 30 years of local funding. We came out net ahead in an environment where cities are crashing. We essentially caught ourselves way early from the end of redevelopment funds,” said Peter Cohen, executive director of the San Francisco Council of Community Housing Organizations.

Without it, Cohen says many affordable housing projects in the existing pipeline would be lost. “This last year was a bumpy year, and we will not be back to the same operation level for a number of years,” Cohen said. “There was a dip and we are coming out of that dip. It will take us a while to get back up to speed.”

The progressive side was also able to eliminate some of the more controversial items in the original proposal, including provisions that would expand the number of annual condo conversions allowed by the city and encourage rental properties to be converted into tenancies-in-common.

With ballot measures notoriously hard to amend, the Affordable Housing Trust Fund measure is a broad outline with many of the details of how the fund would be administered yet to be filled in. If passed, it will be up to Olson Lee, head of the Mayors Office on Housing and former local head of the demised redevelopment agency, to fill in the details, folding what was essential two partnered affordable housing agencies into a single local unit.

But even the most progressive members of the affordable housing community said there was no other alternative to addressing affordable housing in the wings — which is indeed a crisis now that redevelopment funds are gone — making this measure essential.

As Sara Shortt of the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco told the Rules Committee, “We lost a very important funding mechanism. We have to replace it. We have no choice.”

Best of the Bay 2012: Local Heroes

Andrew Lam
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9

2012 Local Heroes

Alex Tom and Shaw San Liu

Alex Tom and Shaw San Liu — the executive director and lead organizer for the Chinese Progressive Association, which celebrates its 40th anniversary on Aug. 4 — have laid the groundwork for a progressive resurgence in San Francisco by organizing Chinese immigrants and actively building close and mutually supportive relationships with working-class allies throughout the city.

The two have been involved in just about every recent effort to counter the pro-corporate neoliberalism that has come to dominate City Hall these days. They have seized space with Occupy San Francisco and they have supported labor unions and helped to create the Progressive Workers Alliance. They have fought foreclosures and pushed for affordable housing reforms, and they have protected vulnerable immigrant workers from wage theft by unscrupulous employers.

“Shaw San and Alex are incredibly talented organizers and movement builders who are managing to do the nearly impossible,” said N’Tanya Lee, who worked closely with the pair as the director of Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth. “They have built an authentic base of working-class Chinese immigrants who are interested in fighting for change in their community, and are creating a grassroots organization at the forefront of building multi-racial alliances to combat the divide-and-conquer strategies that are confronting us.”

Liu, who joined CPA six years ago, said she’s always inspired to see the old photographs on the walls of CPA’s office, and to read the history of CPA’s organizing and advocacy on behalf of working people. She said the organization has always understood the need to forge alliances with labor unions and other progressive interests.

“The organization itself has been, since its inception, playing a critical role in bridging the needs of Chinese interests with other communities,” Liu said. “I’ve always seen my role as bridge building.”

Today — with stagnant real wages, a deteriorating social safety net, and growing power by corporations that enjoy unprecedented political clout thanks to Citizens United and other court rulings — the need to organize people across cultural lines is more important than ever, even if that begins by addressing the individual needs of each community.

“Always at our core, it’s about empowering our folks to be able to voice their own struggles and visions,” Liu said.

Working to build that capacity within the Chinese immigrant community is hard and important work, Liu said, but it’s equally important to connect with the struggles of working class people from other communities, uniting to effectively counter the political dominance of employers and property owners.

Lui framed the struggle as: “How do we build unity and not have that be lip service?”

Tom and Liu have demonstrated that they know how to do just that, despite the diversity of sometimes-conflicting interests on the left and in a working class squeezed by recession and feelings of economic uncertainty.

“The issue that will unify people is good jobs that are accessible to everyone,” Liu said.

Yet she also said that working class organizing is needed to counter the simplistic “jobs” rhetoric coming from City Hall, which politicians are using to advocate for tax cuts to big corporations.

“More and more, it exposes itself as a total lie,” Liu said of the argument that the city should be facilitating private sector job creation with business tax cuts. “So much points to the fact that the US economic system doesn’t benefit everyone … When we talk about jobs, we talk about what kinds of jobs we want and for whom.”

 

2012 Local Heroes

Stardust and Ross Rhodes

Ross Rhodes and Stardust, like all of the people involved in Occupy Bernal, are neighbors. But until Stardust helped found the group — a local take on Occupy focused on stopping unjust foreclosures and evictions — they didn’t know each other.

Now they do, and if it wasn’t for Occupy Bernal, Rhodes is sure he would no longer have the house that his parents bought in 1964.

A former college football star, Rhodes injured his knees and back playing. He lives on disability payments, volunteering at the 100 Percent College Prep Club, and bringing home-cooked meals to seniors in his area. He also coached kids in the Junior 49ers program until it became too hard on his injuries.

Stardust, an ESL teacher and oboe player in the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony and the SF Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band, has been working for LGBT rights, women’s rights, and online civil rights for years. When Occupy took off, he gravitated toward the neighborhood fights against foreclosures.

Like people all over the US, Rhodes and his wife were fooled several years ago by a pick-a-payment loan plan. At the time, World Savings was peddling the deals through neighborhoods, promising potential borrowers that they could send their kids to college, buy a car, take vacations — and modify their loans after a year.

But when Rhodes started to apply for loan modifications, he was denied. He kept receiving letters asking for more information, often the same information he had already given — a common story that led to part of the Homeowners Bill of Rights that will guarantee a single point of contact from the bank. He was stumped when he was told he needed more income — the bank said it wouldn’t accept payments that were more than 30 percent of a borrower’s income, and Rhodes was getting a fixed disability check.

He found another income source as a homecare provider, but after all the time that the bank wouldn’t accept his payments, Rhodes was marked as someone who wasn’t making payments, and was tracked for foreclosure.

Meanwhile, Occupy Bernal was working on more than 100 similar cases in its neighborhood. The organizers hadn’t quite convinced Mayor Ed Lee to help at that point, but Rep. Pelosi’s staffers were on their side, getting banks to prioritize the cases of those working with Occupy Bernal. They worked with other community groups like Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) to do physical occupations of homes. But for those who had received a notice of default and a notice of sale — two steps in the foreclosure process that precede the auction of a property — Stardust was there with another tactic.

He spearheaded Occupy the Auctions. He shows up at City Hall at 1:30 every day and tries to disrupt foreclosure auctions. He’s been there continuously since April 27, 2012, and has stopped dozens of home sales. When fighting the eviction of a neighbor, he is sometimes backed by more than 100 people. But many days it’s just Stardust.

Now, Rhodes is in a loan modification process. Rather than conflicting and confusing machine-generated paper work, he gets regular calls about the status of his modification from a point person in Wells Fargo’s executive complaint office. He testified in Sacramento in favor of the Homeowners Bill of Rights, which passed July 2. He’s also become an Occupy Bernal organizer on top of his other volunteer pursuits.

Stardust battles mega-banks and the city’s wealthiest in his work. But he says the biggest challenge is helping people to get over the shame they feel when they realize they are facing foreclosure. “It’s not their fault,” he says. “It’s the system.”

Friends of Ethics

In the summer of 2011, at the behest of the Ethics Commission, the Board of Supervisors put on the ballot a measure that would have loosened some of the rules for campaign consultant reporting, and would have allowed further changes in the city’s landmark ethics laws without a vote of the people. It had unanimous support on the board — and frankly, technical changes in campaign laws are not the kind of sexy stuff that gets the public angry.

But a small group, led in part by five former ethics commissioners, took on the task of defeating the measure. The activists also took on the challenge of defeating Prop. E, which would have allowed the supervisors to amend future measures passed by the voters.

Despite being outspent by tens of thousands of dollars, Friends of Ethics — a small grassroots operation — prevailed. Both measures were defeated (32 percent to 67 percent in the case of Prop. E, the worst loss of all the local measures on the ballot).

The group is great at forming coalitions: in the case of the No on E and F campaign, Friends of Ethics reached out to some 30 organizations that formally joined in opposing the measures after hearing presentations.

The members of FOE are a fractious group of organizers and shit-disturbers who don’t always get along or agree on other issues. But they’ve come together to do something nobody else does: make protecting and expanding political reform laws a front-line priority.

And the battle goes on. Not long after the November 2011 election, Supervisor Scott Wiener introduced legislation that would have led to less disclosure of political contributions before an election, and would have made it easier to conceal who was making contributions and paying for campaign mailers. The Wiener bill would weaken campaign contribution limit, giving the wealthiest donors greater power in elections.

When the amendments were heard at a well-attended Rules Committee in June (with plenty of public comment from Friends of Ethics), the supervisors sent the amendments back to the Ethics Commission to be rewritten.

The next step for the Friends of Ethics is to work with interested supervisors to push for changes to the city’s campaign laws that will actually benefit the public, such as increased transparency in election contributions and expanded campaign restrictions for those receiving contracts and other benefits from the city.

In an era defined by the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United case and a nationwide assault on fair elections, it’s critical work.

Friends of Ethics can be reached at sfethicsfriend@gmail.com

2012 Local Heroes

The Occupy movement

When Adbusters magazine called for people to show up on September 17, 2011, in New York City to protest the way Wall Street was holding the country hostage, no one could have predicted what would emerge.

It was the start of a movement, and San Francisco heeded the call. About 100 people gathered in the city’s Financial District. They started camping. And the effort exploded.

In the first few weeks, camps sprung up across the country. In Chicago and Los Angeles, in Bethel, Alaska and Tuscaloosa, Alabama, people were drawn together. But, unlike most protests, they stayed together. Night after night.

Along the way, a certain prevailing narrative from outside observers never quite got it right. First the camps were dismissed as nothing but bratty college students and hippies. Then they were called dirty and filled with homeless people. (Occupy challenged the whole idea of a monolithic homeless population. Once they had a home in the Occupy tent cities, homeless people were just — shocker — people.)

By December, when most of the campers had been kicked out, the narrative shifted. Occupy was resting, hibernating, many declared. Some snickered at the fair-weather activists who would only come out in the sunshine.

But in the Bay Area, at least, that hibernation story was simply false. On December 12, Occupy Oakland brought out thousands for its second port shutdown, in solidarity with port workers. On January 20, downtown banks were forced to close for the day and people in the streets celebrated Occupy San Francisco’s shutdown of the financial district. A week later, 400 were arrested when thousands tried to turn a vacant Oakland building into a community center. This was no hibernation.

Actions in some way inspired or fueled by Occupy have continued into the spring and summer. On March 1, Occupy, with a focus on student debt and accessible education, formed the 99 Mile March. Dozens marched from the Bay Area to Sacramento to join thousands of students and supporters in calling for an end to cuts to education; hundreds then occupied the Capitol building. On April 22, Occupy, with a focus on food justice, formed the Gill Tract Occupy the Farm action. Hundreds took a UC Berkeley-stewarded tract of land slated for a baseball diamond and a Whole Foods and planted it, turning it into a farm with rows of crops, a kids space, and a permaculture garden. On June 15, Occupy formed the Lakeview sit-in and Peoples School for Public Education, which taught day camp to children and refused to leave a beloved Oakland elementary school, one of five slated for closure.

Police eventually won the many-months battle with most Occupy groups in the Bay Area. The camps are mostly gone, though a tenacious group keeps its 24-hour protest in front of the Federal Reserve.

But because of Occupy — and its accompanying burst in resistance, creativity, and the belief that we really can, and must, come together to do something — dozens of Bay Area residents remain in homes that were facing foreclosure. Hundreds of people who felt forgotten and abandoned have found community. Thousands have been inspired to start their own projects and work with others.

When Adbusters called Occupy Wall Street to action, it was under the banner of “democracy not corporatocracy.” That ain’t an easy project. But it has already made the world a better and more hopeful place. 

8 Washington’s going on the ballot

Zelda Bronstein
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63
8 Washington’s going on the ballot

San Franciscans are going to get a chance to vote on the most expensive condos in the city’s history and the future of development on the waterfront as soon as this November.

Opponents of the 8 Washington project turned in 31,721 signatures to the Department of Elections July 19, and since only about 19,000 have to be valid, it’s a safe bet the referendum will qualify.

That means no work can be done on the development until after the election — and since the deadlines are tight and it’s possible the DOE won’t get its counting and verifying done in time for November, 2012, the whole thing could be on hold until 2013.

It’s going to be a bitter and expensive campaign: Developer Simon Snellgrove tried to keep this off the ballot — and, since he has about $200 million riding on the outcome, he’s going to spend what it takes to win. The Stop the Wall on the Waterfront folks aren’t going to be able to match Snellgrove by any stretch, but they’ve raised some money and they’ll be able to run an effective campaign.

And we can have an important public debate: Should the city continue to build housing for the very rich when it can’t keep up with its existing affordable-housing requirements? And what will happen to San Francisco if the people who work here can’t afford to live here and the people who live here don’t work here (or in many cases, don’t work at all because they’re stinking rich)?

Is $11 million in affordable housing money enough for a project that will make a $200 million profit?

Gonna be a good one.

Guardian Voices: There’s something happening here

Zelda Bronstein
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25
Guardian Voices: There’s something happening here

There are distinct signs of the rebirth of a grassroots  balanced-growth  movement in San Francisco, and some small indication that it’s even beginning to shift, ever so slightly,  the politics of the Board of Supervisors.  This is very good news for the vast majority of San Franciscans.

First, a little history.

Land use and the approval of major development projects lie at the very heart of San Francisco politics. Developers and their allies (the building trades, contractors, bankers, architects, land-use lawyers, consultants, and  permit expeditors) are the primary source of political money for candidates for local office. Since the freeway and urban renewal fights of the 1960s, the very definition of  progressive  politics in San Francisco has been the attempt to build a political base of  residents to resist that money.  So-called moderates are simply the political extension of the pro-development lobby using its money to consolidate developer control of the public approval process.

In most cities, land-use issues — zoning, permits, urban design — is left to elites. Not so in San Francisco. Here, land use is talked about at neighborhood meetings and on street corners. The heart the reason is our compact size: 46.7 square miles, and the prohibition of filling in any more of the Bay to create new land. There is no vacant land in San Francisco. Any new major development almost always displaces something already there.  Development is a zero sum game, with winner and losers.  And the losers  leave town.

Land-use politics is about staying here — and that creates real interest among San Francisco residents.

The funding for major development in San Francisco has dramatically changed in the 45 years since the freeway and anti-urban-renewal fights of the mid-1960s. Back then, it was public sector money that fueled development. Yet, with that money, due to the actions of  progressive politicians like Phil and John Burton and George Moscone, came its own remedy: votes to not accept the public money for freeways (Moscone) and votes creating either laws that either prohibited displacement or funded legal assistance to the poor, empowering  them to stop government agencies through litigation (the Burtons at both the state and federal level).

Since the money for freeways and urban renewal was from the government, the focus of the early balanced growth  forces was on government itself, through massive lobbying campaigns to affect officials’ votes (the freeway fight), or the use of government-funded lawyers  to protect poor people’s  interests ( the WACO and TOOR lawsuits against redevelopment).

All of that changed starting in the 1970s, when Richard Nixon and later Ronald Reagan deregulated oversight of urban development by creating a system of  block grants and ended funding for legal assistance for the poor.  Large-scale development was effectively privatized, moving it from being designed, funded, and approved at public meetings by government officials following regulations to being designed and funded in private — and having a Kabuki-play-like public approval process with little real oversight. With the passage of Prop 13 in 1978, which limited the main source of local government revenue — property taxes — local governments became even more reliant on private developer money to create new revenue.

The popular response to this change in the development process in San Francisco was the emergence of a politics that relied on the old progressive-era reforms of the initiative, referendum, and recall. Through a series of initiatives, the community sought to impose regulations on the development process, culminating in the 1986 Proposition M, which actually limited the amount of high-rise office space developers could build, completely imposing the popular will over a supine set of local officials and politicians. Indeed, ten years earlier, again through the initiative processes, the very nature of the Board of Supervisors was changed from a developer-friendly at-large system to a district-election system. Hotly opposed by real estate and development interests, district elections in its brief three years of existence (repealed in the wake of the Moscone-Milk assassinations, even though they were both strong supporters of the system and their assassin opposed it…ironies abound in San Francisco politics) saw limits placed on condo conversions and the passage of rent control.

In each of these multi-year efforts, a citywide coalition was formed, including an ever-expanding set of communities and neighborhoods.  Common interests were defined that cut across race, class, and geography and issues of community (neighborhood) control and funding for essential services like Muni, affordable housing, childcare, and employment training were placed on the table – and developers had to address them if they wanted projects approved.

The point is that balanced growth came from community-based political forces, not elected officials.  Broad movements were built — in the end, encompassing elements of labor. These were victories won not by elected officials but by a popular movement.

In 2000, in the wake of  the dot-com bust, another balanced-growth measure, Prop. L, aimed at cutting then-Mayor Willie Brown’s power over development, was paired with the new district election system — and a broad coalition of forces including labor, community and neighborhood organizations won a major progressive victory.

Every candidate for supervisor who supported the balanced-growth measure won. Every candidate who opposed it and supported Brown lost. While Prop L narrowly lost, its policies and objectives were passed as ordinances by the new Board of Supervisors (banning live-work lofts, closing loopholes in the planning code, requiring neighborhood-based plans for the Mission, SOMA, and Potrero Hill).

But as is so often the case, the victory of 2000 led to the slow dissolution of the coalition that created it. Folks had won. Our supervisors could handle all these issues; we no longer had to. By the end of the term of the supervisors elected as the class of 2000, very little of that citywide coalition existed any more.

With the Great Recession of 2008, advances were rolled back.  Fees on local developers for affordable housing, childcare and transit were deferred in order to stimulate development.  A new era of “moderation” was announced by elected officials, led by Mayor Gavin Newsom. Desires to “attract and retain”  business saw new tax concessions in the name of “jobs” and a new willingness to use open space and public facilities for “private/public partnerships” was announced.

By 2012 any concept of balanced growth had been replaced with a new era of “cooperation” between city officials and developers.

Until recently, that is.

It should be clear to all that for the last four years, City Hall has been eager to approve any scheme presented by private developers — from the America’s Cup nonsense to highrise luxury condos on the waterfront. The siren song of the developers — more revenue if you approve our project — has been proven false again and again, as the revenue never really matches the real costs of these projects. The city’s essential services continue to shrink. Transit fees are too low to pay for the actual new costs of Muni. The affordable housing  fees are too little to actually meet the affordable housing needs of the new, poorly-paid workers employed in the retail and service industry that is always a part of these projects.

More and more of our parks and public open spaces are made available to private users, while few if any new public parks or open spaces are being created.  Indeed, the Department of Parks and Recreation often opposes new public parks — because it can’t maintain what it has.

So it is with fondness that these old eyes see the stirring of what appears to be the awakening political  giant of a new controlled-growth movement.

Here’s how it’s happening: The formation of a multi-neighborhood coalition to oppose fee increases at the Arboretum leads to a bigger coalition to oppose artificial turf  fields in western Golden Gate Park, which leads to an even-bigger coalition placing a policy statement against the privatization of Coit Tower on the ballot and winning.

These are important indications of a broad dissatisfaction with the endless private-public-partnership ( in which all the costs are public and all the profits are private) babble from Rec and Park.

The submission by a broad based coalition of more than 30,000 signatures to place the 8 Washington on the ballot — the first land-use referendum in decades — is an incredibly important achievement, and shows the popular sentiment against much of the City Hall happy talk about development on the waterfront.

But it was the unanimous ( yes, unanimous) vote by the Board of Supervisors last Tuesday to hold California Pacific Medical Center accountable for its constant shape shifting  on its massive project at Geary and Van Ness that shows, perhaps, the outline of the potential future of the balanced-growth movement in San Francisco.

Six supervisors stated their willingness to turn down the environmental impact report on the project unless Sutter/CPMC committed to a project that addressed not only the promise to keep St. Luke’s open for at least 20 years but also hired more San Franciscans, corrected the traffic nightmare predicted for Geary and Van Ness, provided more affordable housing for its own low-income new workforce, and committed  to cap the city’s health care costs as a result of CPMC’s market control the new project would create.

There is always the possibility that the two-week delay will go nowhere, but this kind of talk from this Board of Supervisors to a huge private developer simply has not occurred in the recent past.  No one from Room 200 showed up to twist supervisors’ arms in favor of Sutter.  Sutter was on its own and got rolled.

The coalition that fought Sutter to a standstill at the board, that defined the inadequacies of  the project listed by the supervisors, was a multi-neighborhood, multi-issues organization composed of community, neighborhoods, and labor. Middle class “Baja” Pacific Heights residents and low income seniors from Bernal Heights, non-profit affordable housing advocates and trade unionists, tenant organizers from the Tenderloin and Sierra Club members from the Haight-Ashbury; single moms from the Bayview and Filipino youth from the South of Market.

It was a San Francisco coalition, one that has been working together for nearly three years, blending issues, making concessions to one another and staying together.  A group like this with a set of demands such as these has not prevailed at City Hall for nearly a decade.  It still may not, indeed the chances are slim that its full demands will be achieved.

But this group moved the Board of Supervisors in a way not seen in years.  If the folks mobilized about our parks and the folks mobilized about our waterfront and the folks mobilized about CPMC get together, we have something very big happening. And it might be just in time to make a real difference.
It reminds me of an old saying: “ The people alone are the makers of world history.”

We can stop 8 Washington

Zelda Bronstein
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19
We can stop 8 Washington

There’s a week left to stop the sale of San Francisco’s waterfront to the 1 percent.

The Board of Supervisors approved the 8 Washington project, and a coalition that (for various reasons) opposes this giant pile of housing for the very, very rich is trying to put the issue on the ballot. That takes a lot of signatures, and there’s only one week left to collect them.

I could tell you the story of why this project sucks, or you could just read it here. In my mind, it’s simple: If we are using public land to build housing for the richest people in the country, allowing a developer to clear a couple hundred million dollars while offering the city only $11 million for affordable housing — nowhere near enought to equalize the housing imbalance inherent in this deal — then we’re losing the city’s future.

But there’s still time. If you want to help, go here. Stop by 15 Columbus Ave or call 415-894-7008.

Hell, I’m willing to have a discussion this fall about the really, really dumb idea of tearing down the Hetch Hetchy dam. Let’s at least give the voters a chance to look at the future of the city’s housing policy.

 

Hearing could work out flaws in Lee’s housing trust fund proposal

Sasha Cuttler
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2

Mayor Ed Lee’s proposed Housing Trust Fund charter amendment — which he proposed during his inaugural address in January — will be up for review before the Board of Supervisors Rules Committee tomorrow (Wed/11) in the hopes of making its way onto the November ballot. The meeting is at 1:30pm in City Hall Room 263.

The measure, which would guarantee money for affordable housing for the next 30 years, was drafted primarily by the Council of Community Housing Organization (CCHO) and the Mayor’s Office, but included input from housing developers, the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), and some supervisors.

Supporters intend the housing trust fund to provide a consistent stream of funding that guarantees $1.2 billion over a 30-year period for affordable housing. Each year the fund would take in between $20 million and $50 million. In addition to building new housing, it would create a $15 million homebuyers assistance program, doubling the current funds, and a $15 million home stabilization fund to help homeowners facing foreclosure. But Lee hasn’t convinced his business community allies to adequately fund the measure and there are doubts about its revenue projections.

Sup. John Avalos is cosponsoring the measure and helped draft some content, but he isn’t ready to vote for it yet. He is concerned with some of the big concessions the measure grants to market-rate developers, which could end up actually hurting existing affordable housing programs.

“I am watching closely,” Avalos said, “to make sure we don’t give too much away.”

Here are the three concessions: 1) High-rise residential developers would be allowed to pay inclusionary housing fees for affordable housing after construction instead up upfront. 2) Low to mid-rise developers would have the percentage of onsite affordable housing unit requirements lowered from 15 percent to 12 percent. 3) Developers of small five-to-nine-unit buildings would no longer have the inclusionary housing fee or the onsite affordable housing requirement.

The housing trust gets its funding by trying recapture the disbanded Redevelopment Agency’s bond repayments and hotel tax funds, but Fernando Marti of CCHO doesn’t believe that would capture nearly as much as Lee hopes. Marti estimates that the money would eventually lead to $13 million a year, which is a far cry from the previous $50 million needed.

Marti said the rest of the funding he hopes will come from the two competing business tax reform measures developed by Lee and Avalos, although Avalos has make clear that the $40 million his measure would raise is intended for the General Fund to maintain city services that have been cut in recent years. Lee’s measure would generate $13 million that he would earmark for the housing trust fund.

Marti said if the housing trust is approved by voters but the business tax reform fails, Lee has inserted language into the measure that would allow him to unilaterally abolish the housing trust fund. Marti said the CCHO doesn’t want the money for the housing trust to come out of the cash-strapped general fund.

Avalos is skeptical of Lee’s approach, telling us, “That doesn’t sound like anything I’d vote for.”

Gosh, we need more condos for millionaires

Zelda Bronstein
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58
Gosh, we need more condos for millionaires

I guess it’s really, really important for San Francisco to build more housing for the very rich because there’s just such a profound need for it. In fact, the demand for million-dollar condos is so high, and the supply so tight, that the folks at Rincon Tower (which is hideous) are bringing in celebrities to try to sell the last few units.

You don’t find many mid-range and affordable units sitting on the market; in fact, there’s a long waiting list and a lottery for affordable housing. Because there’s more demand than supply. On a policy level, one would think that the city would seek to match supply and demand (since the free market clearly isn’t doing it). But no: SF continues to approve housing for people who don’t need it and won’t balance that out with the level of affordable housing that IS desperately needed.

Smart.

Bevan Dufty’s all wet and woofy

Zelda Bronstein
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20
Bevan Dufty’s all wet and woofy

I’ve had issues with Bevan Dufty. Oh, lord, I’ve had issues. He so often voted the wrong way on the Board of Supervisors and was the only major candidate running for mayor who answered No to the affordable housing question at the Guardian mayoral forum.

But I have to say, he’s doing quite the creative job as the mayor’s homeless coordinator. I’ve always liked the idea of the “wet house” — a place where alcoholics can drink in safety. It’s basic harm reduction, something that sometimes conflicts with the prevailing wisdom on sobriety but will almost certainly save lives. He’s taking the right line on panhandling — the other day, he told me, he spoke in front of the Interfaith Council and complained about the notion of refusing to give money to panhandlers because they might use it for drugs and alcohol.

“Well,” he said, “there are people in this room who generate money for drugs and alcohol. What if that principle applied to your paycheck?”

(I always give money to panhandlers. I also spend part of my paycheck on Bud Light and bourbon. Deal with it.)

And now he’s got the puppy plan.

You can laugh at this all you want, and a lot of people will, but I think it’s a fabulous idea. It won’t solve homelessness, and I know that these little side trips can divert attention from the massive social problem that is housing costs and homelessness in this city, but still:

There are dogs that need to be adopted. There are lonely people who are in SROs who can adopt those dogs. It might keep some of them from panhandling. It will certainly make a number of canine and human creatures a lot more happy.

Remember PAWS? (One of my favorite groups.) These folks figured out in the worst days of the AIDS pandemic that having companion animals around made people’s lives better, and they worked to help people with AIDS keep their pets. Now they work with seniors and low-income people, providing support and services.

The dogs don’t care if their owners are living in an SRO; they’re happy to have a home. The people who might be isolated and stressed living alone and with very little money have a bit of light in their lives. Although a lot of SROs don’t take pets (and I get it — pit bulls on crack and fleas and shit), the Community Housing Partnership is working with Dufty on a pilot program, and if it works he cann push it further.

And that’s not the end. Under Sup. Scott Wiener’s recent legislation, dog walkers (thousand of ’em) are supposed to have some basic dog-training skills, and there aren’t that many places that offer those classes — but Dufty tells me he thinks maybe some low-income SRO residents can learn to teach dog training classes and make some money that way.

Again: Little stuff. I still want to tax the rich to provide housing as a human right for all. But things are not good on the streets of San Francisco, and every little bit helps.

 

 

Guardian voices: The zombie condo converters

Zelda Bronstein
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28
Guardian voices: The zombie condo converters

What is the shelf life of  a really bad public policy concerning housing in  San Francisco?

When it comes to condo conversions of existing rent controlled apartments, the answer is that there is no limit on how many times this bad idea is taken off the shelf. Like a bad summer zombie movie, this undead keeps  walking, no matter what San Franciscans say.

A little history.  In 1982 Supervisor Willie Kennedy, not a bomb-throwing tenant advocate by any stretch, sponsored legislation that limited the  conversion of existing apartments to condos to no more than 200 a year. The measure did not touch new constriction, allowing unlimited condominium construction. Indeed, from 1983 to 2000, some 12,200 new condos were built, an average of some 680 units a year. Since 2000, nearly 100 percent of all new residential constriction is built as condos; there is no limit on renting a condo, but an annual limit in converting an existing apartment. Clearly, condos are a tenure type of housing that is dramatically expanding.

The reason Kennedy and the at-large elected Board of Supervisors voted for the annual limit was to protect rent-controlled apartments, a type of housingthat can’t be expanded. San Francisco’s 1978  rent control ordinance exempted all new construction from being under rent control. So rent-controlled apartments were a fixed number — all apartments built before 1978 — banned by law from ever being expanded. 

Yet those apartments are the largest number of affordable housing units available to moderate and middle income households. Thus, there’s a rational desire to preserve them by a public policy that limits their conversion to condos because they are declining in numbers.

And San Francisco voters understand and support this very rational policy.

In 1989, realtors and speculators tried to overturn the annual limit, proposing a measure that said if 51 percent of a building’s existing tenants voted for a conversion, then the building could be converted with no annual limit. This proposal laid out a future of a Hobbesian society here in San Francisco with one set of well-to-do tenants fighting another set of less-well-off tenants, building by building. San Francisco voters defeated the measure 63-37.

But in the land of the living dead condo converters, no is never the answer.
 
In 2002, Gavin Newsom, Tony Hall and Leland Yee, Plan C, and the Chamber of Commerce placed another measure on the ballot to repeal the annual limit. It too, was  rejected: 60 percent voted no, and 40 percent yes. The measure was defeated in all of the supervisorial districts except  Newsom’s D2, Tony Hall’s D7, and Leland Yee’s D4.

Tenant and affordable housing advocates were not unmoved by the desire of tenants, especially in privately owner rental housing facing Ellis Act and TIC evictions, to seek the protection of home ownership. In 2008 they supported an amendment to the Subdivision Code carving out from the annual limit conversions of apartments by nonprofit, limited equity housing
co-ops.

Now were are confronted again by a desire to allow more conversions of rent controlled units by private buyers who bought into the TIC dodge around the annual condo conversion limit.

Since TIC’s do not require a sub-division map, creating legally recognized separate units, they became “grey market” condos. With hot mortgage money flowing during the bubble, TIC owners could get financing. Now, banks are actually following some laws and will not lend to buy a legally grey TIC.  Thus the move to get them converted to legal condos.
 
This is, in its most basic form, yet another bailout caused by speculative capitalism. We seem to no longer believe in the market as an economic system, in which bad economic decisions result in economic loss for the folks involved. We now seem to believe in the “market society” — in which those with money get to keep it no matter what bad decisions they make.

What this is all about is not really homeownership but about home sales. After all, if you have a TIC you already have a home. You want to convert it to a condo not to live in, but to sell. To make it easier to sell TICs would make it harder to sell the thousands of already approved but stalled new condos.

Mayor Lee administration want to stimulate these stalled condo developments, claiming they will create constriction jobs. The Farrell and Wiener condo conversion plan undercuts these efforts and, of course, will create no jobs for anyone but realtors and moving companies.

This is called a “contradiction of capitalism,” when one set of capitalists seek, to the disadvantage of another group of capitalists, to get the government to intervene on their behalf.  But it does prove once again that Lenin was right when he said that one could count on one set of capitalists to compete with each other to sell rope to hang another set.

It’s really bad economic policy, and even worse housing policy.

The 8 Washington embarrassment

Zelda Bronstein
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16
The 8 Washington embarrassment

I wasn’t shocked by the vote on 8 Washington. I knew it was happening; I knew we’d lost when the EIR went through. I knew we couldn’t count on a solid progressive bloc any more. I knew that the lobbying was intense.

But I have to say, at the end of the day I was embarrassed. Because the supervisors sold the city cheap.

In the earlier board discussions, Sup. Christina Olague and Sup. Eric Mar mentioned their concerns about the heigh and bulk of the project and said they would work with the developer, Simon Snellgrove, on changes. But the final project was exactly the same size.

Olague and Sup. Jane Kim were concerned about the amount of parking; the developer agreed to cut 50 spaces. But the actual size of the garage won’t be reduced at all; the only promise: There won’t be valet parking, so maybe not so many cars will fit.

Yes, Snellgrove agreed to set aside some scholarships for low-income kids to swim in the pool, which is a great thing and I fully support it. For a project that, according to available figures, will net the developer $200 million in profit — according to Sup. David Chiu’s analysis, a 72 percent rate of return — the scholarship money is peanuts.

There’s an additional 50 cent parking levy to pay for surface improvements in the area.

But as Chiu asked at the June 12 meeting, “Is the city getting an appropriate level of benefits based on Snellgrove’s profits?” Project foe Brad Paul — a veteran of more than 30 years of the city’s development wars — doesn’t think so. “They got nothing,” he told me.

Here’s how it went down:

Chiu started off by introducing the board’s budget analyis, Harvey Rose. Rose said he’d reviewed the finances of the project, and concluded that the city would get $50 million less out of the project than the developer or the Port of San Francisco, which owns some of the land and is a primary proponent, had originally claimed. Chiu also noted that not all the documents were in the file, but nobody else seemed to care.

In fact, through most of the discussion — limited discussion — and final votes, it was pretty clear that nobody was swayed by any of the facts that Chiu put forward. This deal was done long before the board members took their seats.

Chiu offered a series of amendments, none of them terribly radical. He pointed out that the deal requires the city to pay the developer $5 million for open-space improvements. “That’s an anomaly,” Chiu said, and moved that it be removed.

Kim, who throughout the meeting was the strongest supporter of the project, argued that the city often reimburses developers for open space. More, she said, compared to what the city has asked other major residential developers to give, this project is just dandy. “I would not say this is not a fair deal for the city,” she told her colleagues.

The vote on the $5 million giveaway? Developer 6, SF 5. Siding with Snellgrove: Christina Olague, Scott Wiener, Carmen Chu, Sean Elsbernd, Mark Farrell, and Jane Kim. Siding with Chiu and project opponents: John Avalos, David Campos, Malia Cohen, and Eric Mar. It’s an odd lineup — Cohen doesn’t always vote with the progressives, and I have to say it’s strange to see Kim and Olague siding with the four most conservative supervisors.

Chius’s second proposal: Since the city’s benefits were $50 million less than advertised, why not add $14 million to the affordable housing fee?
Developer: 7. Affordable housing: 4. Voting for the developer: Olague, Wiener, Chu, Elsbernd, Farrell, Kim and Mar.

Okay, one last try. Chiu suggested maybe just $2 million more for affordable housing. Wiener, as is he way, went off on his usual complaint that too much of the affordable housing money is for poor people and not enough for the middle class. The final vote:

Developer: 6. Affordable housing: 5. Voting for the developer: Olague, Wiener, Chu, Elsbernd, Farrell, Kim.

Kim, again, took the lead in promoting the deal on the final vote, saying that a parking lot and a private club were not a good use for the space and that “we are achieving here is a higher and better use for the land.” That’s what every developer talks about, by the way — higher and better use.

She also talked about One Rincon, that hideous tower next to the Bay Bridge that was approved after then-Sup. Chris Daly cut a deal with the developer that the San Francisco Chronicle denounced as a “shakedown.”

Kim said that, considering the much-smaller size of the Snellgrove project, the benefits were richer than the Rincon deal.

I never liked the Rincon deal — that tower’s a disaster, an ugly scar on the skyline, and there was nowhere near enough affordable housing money. That’s because I think that the city should be building six affordable units for every four market-rate units, that there’s no need for more housing for the very rich and that our current housing policy is a disaster. (The Guardian wrote an editorial at the time that said it was good that Daly had gotten that much money, but was dubious about the whole project. In retrospect, we were too kind.)

I think all my readers at this point know that. So does Daly.

But I asked the former supervisor anyway to comment on the difference between 8 Washington and One Rincon. His thoughts:

1. The Rincon Hill agreement was negotiated by the district Supervisor working together with the communities most impacted by the development. 8 Washington was opposed by the district Supervisor and many nearby residents.
2. Most people in the South of Market were not diametrically opposed to highrise development in that location. The Planning Department had been working on a Rincon Hill neighborhood plan and was recommending upzoning for the area.
3. Rincon Hill had no waterfront trust issues.
4. The Rincon HIll development impact fee was $25 per square foot (over and above the required inclusionary affordable housing fee even though the Mayor’s Office contended that over $20 per square foot would kill the deal.) According to Kim’s release, her 8 Washington deal netted an additional $2 million for affordable housing and a $.50 parking surcharge. This even though development in Rincon Hill is not as valuable as the northern waterfront.

Folks: I think the city got taken to the cleaners here. I’ll stipulate that I’m against this project for much broader reasons. And maybe I’m just an old commie who thinks that the richer you are, the more you should give back, that the affordable housing fees on the most expensive condos in San Francisco should be higher than normal, that if Snellgrove nets $200 million, then the city by definition left too much on the table.

But I don’t think I’m alone in believing that if you’re going to approve something that will make a developer this rich, and let him use public land to do it, on the waterfront, you ought to get your fair share. And that didn’t happen.

Embarrassing.

No deal yet on business tax reform as competing measure are introduced

Sasha Cuttler
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21
No deal yet on business tax reform as competing measure are introduced

Mayor Ed Lee and his business community allies failed to reach an agreement with labor and progressives by today’s deadline for submitting fall ballot measures to the Board of Supervisors, leading progressive Sup. John Avalos to introduce a business tax reform measure that would compete with Lee’s proposal.

The Avalos measure would raise $40 million in new General Fund revenue to restore recent cuts to city services while Lee’s would essentially be revenue-neutral, although Lee did tweak the formulas to raise about $13 million in new revenue that would be dedicated to a new Affordable Housing Trust Fund, which would be created by another ballot measure that Lee was having a hard time funding in the face of business community opposition.

“I don’t believe trickle down economics works, except for the 1 percent,” Avalos told the Guardian, arguing the importance of recovering revenue that the city lost when the biggest downtown corporations sued the city in 2001 to invalidate a gross receipts tax. Both the Lee and Avalos measures would gradually convert the current payroll tax into a new version of the gross receipts tax, which is preferred by most of the business community.

So, will voters in the fall be faced with competing ballot measures? Probably not, according to the same sources from the business and progressive sides of the negotiations who told us last week that it appeared a deal was in the offing, something they still believe.

“This is the beginning of the negotiations,” said the business community source, noting that both measures won’t be approved until next month, with discussions about merging them ongoing. “I’m sure this is part of the process and they will agree on a number.”

Our labor source agreed, predicting the two sides will come to an agreement because neither side wants competing ballot measure, but noting that Lee appears to be trying to create divisions between the progressive revenue coalition and the affordable housing advocates. “That’s just positioning on their part, but it doesn’t feel like good faith bargaining,” the source said.

Mayoral Press Secretary Christine Falvey seemed to leave the door open for compromise, telling the Guardian, “The Mayor believes that to be successful, we should continue building consensus around business tax reform and that it’s important that the business community continue to be key partners in that effort.”

Lee is trying to placate an emboldened business community, which has taken a hard line position on opposing new taxes even while seeking ever more tax breaks and public subsidies. In fact, Sup. Mark Farrell had another business tax cut on today’s board agenda, cutting the payroll tax for small businesses at a cost of more than $2 million to city finances.

“I believe we need to do all we can to incentivize job growth in our small business community,” Farrell said.

Avalos said he agrees with helping small businesses – which is why both his and Lee’s business tax reform measure shifts more of the tax burden to the large corporations that have been so profitable in recent years – but that “we should not be putting a hole in the city’s budget to do so.”

In a sign of just how strong the business community has become at City Hall compared to the progressive movement that had a board majority just two years ago, the tax cuts were approved on a 10-1 vote, with only Avalos opposed.

Hospital standoff

Andrew Lam
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2
Hospital standoff

steve@sfbg.com

The controversial and long-awaited proposal by California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC) to build a 550-bed luxury hospital atop Cathedral Hill and to rebuild St. Luke’s Hospital has finally arrived at the Board of Supervisors — where it appears to have little support.

So far, not one supervisor has stepped up to sponsor the deal, and board members say it will have to undergo major changes to meet the city’s needs. “There are still a lot of questions that remain,” Sup. David Campos told us, citing labor, housing, community benefits, and a long list of other issues that he doesn’t believe CPMC has adequately addressed. “It tells me there’s still more work to be done.”

CPMC, which is Sacramento-based nonprofit corporation Sutter Health’s most lucrative affiliate, has been pushing the project for almost a decade. Its advocates have subtly used a state seismic safety deadline for rebuilding St. Luke’s — a hospital relied on by low-income residents of the Mission District and beyond — as leverage to build the massive Cathedral Hill Hospital it envisions as the Mayo Clinic of the West Coast.

But the project’s draft environmental impact report shows the Cathedral Hill Hospital would have huge negative impacts on the city’s transportation system and exacerbate its affordable housing crisis. And CPMC has been in a pitched battle with its labor unions over its refusal to guarantee the new jobs will go to current employees or local residents and be unionized. There are also concerns with the market power CPMC will gain from the project, how that will affect health care costs paid by the city and its residents, and with the company’s appallingly low charity care rates compared to other health care providers (see “Lack of charity,” 12/13/11).

CPMC had refused to budge in negotiations with the Mayor’s Office under two mayors, for which Mayor Ed Lee publicly criticized the company’s intransigence last year. But under pressure from the business community and local trade unions who support the project, Lee cut a deal with CPMC in March.

That development agreement for the $2.5 billion project calls for CPMC to pay $33 million for public transit and roadway improvements, $20 million to endow community clinics and other social services, and $62 million for affordable housing programs, nearly half of which would go toward helping its employees buy existing homes.

While those numbers seem large, community and labor leaders from San Franciscans for Healthcare, Housing, Jobs and Justice (SFHHJJ), which formed in opposition to the project, say they don’t cover anywhere near the project’s full impacts. And given that CPMC made about $180 million in profit last year in San Francisco alone — money that subsidizes the rest of Sutter’s operations — they say the company can and should do better.

“This is about standing up to corporate blackmail,” SFHHJJ member Steve Woo, a community organizer with the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, told us.

 

PIVOTAL PROJECT

CPMC is perhaps the most high-profile project the board will consider this year, one that will impact the city for years, so the political and economic stakes are high.

The Planning Commission voted 5-1 on April 26 to approve the deal and its environmental impact report, citing the project’s economic benefits and the looming deadline for rebuilding St. Luke’s. The Board of Supervisors was scheduled to consider the appeal of that decision on June 12 (after Guardian press time), but activists say supervisors planned to continue the item until July 17.

In the meantime, the board’s Land Use Committee has scheduled a series of hearings on different aspects of the project, starting June 15 with a project overview and presentation on the jobs issue, continuing June 25 with a hearing on its impacts to the health care system. Traffic and neighborhood impacts would be heard the next week, and then housing after that.

Calvin Welch, a progressive activist and nonprofit affordable housing developer, said the project’s EIR makes clear just how paltry CPMC’s proposed mitigation measures are. It indicates that the project’s 3,000 new workers will create a demand for at least 1,400 new two-bedroom housing units. Even accepting that estimate — which Welch says is low given that many employees have families and won’t simply be bunking with one another — the $26 million being provided for new housing construction would only create about 90 affordable studio apartments.

“We’re going to end up, if we want to house that workforce, subsidizing CPMC,” Welch told us.

Compounding that shortcoming is the fact that the Cathedral Hill Hospital is being built in a special use district that city officials established for the Van Ness corridor — where there is a severe need for more housing, particularly affordable units. The SUD calls for developers to build three square feet of residential for every square foot of non-residential development.

“That would require building 3 million square feet of residential housing with this project,” Welch said. “We don’t think $26 million meets the housing requirement for this project, let alone what was envisioned by this [Van Ness corridor] plan.”

SFHHJJ is calling for CPMC to provide at least $73 million for affordable housing, with no more than 20 percent of that going to the company’s first-time homebuyer assistance program. That assistance program does nothing to add to the city’s housing stock and critics call it a valuable employee perk that will only increase the demand for existing housing — and thus drive up prices.

But the business community is strongly backing the deal, and the trade unions are expected to turn out hordes of construction workers at the hearing to make this an issue of jobs — rather than a corporation paying for its impacts to the community.

“After a decade of discussion, debate and compromise, the city’s departments, commissions, labor, business and community groups all agree on CPMC,” San Francisco Chamber of Commerce President Steve Falk wrote in a June 8 e-mail blast entitled “Message to the Board of Supervisors: Don’t Stand in the Way of Progress.”

“The fate of our city’s healthcare infrastructure now lies solely with the Board of Supervisors,” the Chamber says. “When it comes time to vote, let’s insist they make the right choice.”

Yet it’s simply inaccurate to say that labor and community groups support the deal, and both are expected to be well-represented at the hearings.

 

CARE FOR WHOM?

Economic justice issues related to health care access and costs are another potential pitfall for this project. SFJJHH activists note that no supervisors have signed on to sponsor the project yet — which is unusual for something this big — and that even the board’s most conservative supervisors have raised concerns that the city’s health care costs aren’t adequately contained by the deal.

“There’s a significant amount of dissatisfaction with the deal, even among conservatives,” SFJJHH member Paul Kumar, a spokesperson for the National Union of Healthcare Workers, told the Guardian.

On the progressive side, a big concern is that CPMC is proposing to rebuild the 220-bed St. Luke’s with only 80 beds, which activists say is not enough. And even then, CPMC is only agreeing to operate that hospital for 20 years, or even less time if Sutter’s fortunes turn around and the hospital giant begins losing money.

CPMC Director of Communications Kathryn Graham, responding by email to questions and issues raised by the Guardian, wrote generally and positively about CPMC and the project without addressing the specific concerns about whether housing, transportation, and other mitigation payments are too low.

On the jobs issue, she wrote, “Our project will create 1,500 union construction jobs immediately—and preserves and protects the 6,200 health care professional jobs that exist today at the hospitals. Currently, nearly 50 percent of our current employees live in San Francisco. During the construction phase of this project, we are committed to hire at least 30 percent of workers from San Francisco. We will create 500 permanent new jobs in just the next five years—200 are guaranteed to be local hires from underserved San Francisco neighborhoods. We don’t know where you got the ridiculous idea that our employees must reapply for jobs at our new hospitals. That is incorrect.”

Yet CPMC has resisted requests by the California Nurses Association and other unions to be recognized at the new facility or to agree to card-check neutrality that would make it easier to unionize. And union representatives say CPMC has offered few assurances about staffing, pay, seniority, and other labor issues.

As one CNA official told us, “If they aren’t going to guarantee jobs to the existing employees, those are jobs lost to the city.”

“We’re giving Sutter a franchise over San Francisco’s health care system for 30 to 40 years, so we should ensure there are basic worker and community protections,” Kumar said.

Welch and other activists say they believe CPMC is prepared to offer much more than it has agreed to so far, and they’re calling on the supervisors to be tougher negotiators than the Mayor’s Office was, including being willing to vote down the project and start over if it comes down to that.

“They make too much money in this city to just leave town,” Welch said of CPMC’s implied threat to pull out of San Francisco and shutter St. Luke’s. “It’s bullshit.”

Mayor Lee’s business tax reform will include new revenue

Sasha Cuttler
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30
Mayor Lee’s business tax reform will include new revenue

Mayor Ed Lee has acquiesced to labor’s demand that the business tax reform measure being negotiated for the November ballot raise tens of millions of dollars in new revenue, rather than being revenue-neutral as Lee and business leaders had previously insisted, according to Guardian sources in both the business and progressive communities who are involved in the ongoing negotiations.

As we previously reported, SEIU Local 1021 had demanded that the measure – which must be submitted to the Board of Supervisors by Tuesday – raise $30-50 million in additional revenue to prevent cuts to city services and to recapture money the city lost when the largest downtown corporations sued the city in 2001 to invalidate its gross receipts tax. If not, the union threatened to qualify a competing ballot measure that would raise the money, something neither side wants.

Sources say the Mayor’s Office has agreed to structure the tax to raise at least $25 million in new revenue, and some believe they will settle on $30 million, which is being supported by the big technology companies and is probably enough for labor to sign onto the deal.

But a complicating factor is the fact that Lee’s representatives are simultaneously negotiating another ballot measure to create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund that will also need to generate revenue, most likely through an increase in the real estate transfer tax, something the commercial landlords are opposing.

The business community has opposed any tax increases, but it is split between the big technology companies who helped elect Lee and more traditional businesses, including the FIRE (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate) companies that all observers say are likely to get hit with a higher tax burden whatever the outcome of the current negotiations.

There is an urgency to get this deal done now because of the fast-approaching deadline to introduce ballot measures to the board, and the fact that under state law revenue measure can be passed with only a simple majority of voters only in presidential election years.

 

8 Washington isn’t getting much better

Zelda Bronstein
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30
8 Washington isn’t getting much better

When the Board of Supervisors approved the environmental impact report for the most expensive condos in San Francisco history, several members of the board said they weren’t entirely happy with the project. Supervisors Christina Olague and Eric Mar both complained about the height and bulk and Olague said she wanted a parking fee.

So now the project is back, and just won approval at the Budget and Finance Commitee — with only a few minor changes. There’s no adjustment to the height and bulk, although the parking has been cut from 255 spaces to 200 and a 50-cent parking surcharge has been added. Sup. Jane Kim wants to be sure that the pool built in the new facility will be open to low-income youth.

But the city’s not getting a dime more than the $11 million in affordable housing money that developer Simon Snellgrove has already offered — despite the fact that the available financial evidence suggests Snellgrove and his partners will make more than $250 million on the deal. Sup John Avalos made clear that the city’s not getting enough out of this project.

So now it goes to the full board June 12 — and if things go according to the normal San Francisco pattern, the developer will get what he wants and the city will get screwed.

See, when you give developers the opening, they take advantage of it. When you let them over the first hurdle with and 8-3 vote, they get pretty confident that they’re going to win. So why would they compromise on more than few details? Why cut the height and bulk when you know you have the votes?

I respect what Eric Mar, Jane Kim and Christina Olague said about their votes on the EIR — but imagine if it had been a 6-5 vote? Snellgrove might have gotten the message that this wouldn’t be easy. He might be calling Olague and Mar and saying: How much less height? How much less bulk? How much more affordable housing? We might have wound up with a much better deal.

Every time — every single time — a developer presents what is supposed to be the last, best deal it’s a scam. Every time the city has said No, the developer has come back and sweetened the pot. That would have happened here, too.

But no. I predict no height and bulk adjustments, no additional affordable housing money — nothing more than what Budget and Finance already got. Which isn’t enough.

Oh, and by the way: Everyone here already knows that I oppose this project because it’s too much housing for rich people, which we don’t need in this city, and puts the city’s housing balance further out of whack. But if we’re going to sell off the waterfront for all the wrong reasons, we should at least get the best deal we can.

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